Letter: The Failure to Deliver Ash Footbridge Is Symptomatic of a Wider Malaise

Published on: 18 Aug, 2026
Updated on: 18 Aug, 2026

Ash Railway Station – still no footbridge. Geograph

From John Ferns

Ash residents have every reason to be disappointed about the footbridge. This is not simply about convenience.

Network Rail’s own risk assessment placed Ash level crossing 59th riskiest of 320 crossings on the Wessex route, putting it in the top 20 per cent.

A later assessment gave it a collective risk rating of “3 — Very High”. The busy station, large numbers of users and frequent trains were among the identified risk factors.

The footbridge was presented as part of the infrastructure needed to accompany the area’s substantial housing expansion. The road bridge has now been built. But five years on, Network Rail cannot tell residents when a footbridge might be built, what it will look like, who will pay for it, — or even whether it will be built at all!

Nobody expects major infrastructure to appear overnight. Engineering takes time, money is limited and priorities compete. But delay has consequences. We have seen that with “Chester (road) Bridge, where years of delay contributed to rising costs before it finally opened. Leaving the footbridge in limbo will not make it cheaper or easier to build.

And here there is no great mystery about who is responsible.

Network Rail is responsible. Period.

It has had years of feasibility work, design discussions and consideration of funding. Yet it still cannot tell residents what it intends to build, how it will fund it or when it will build it.

How much longer does Network Rail need to reach a decision?

At some point, “the feasibility study is ongoing”, “we are exploring the options” and “we cannot yet confirm a timetable” cease to be satisfactory explanations. They begin to sound rather like “not my department, guv.”

That is what really irritates people. They can accept that money is short and that complicated projects take time. What they find increasingly difficult to accept is a system in which responsibility is clear, but the responsible body can apparently go on considering the matter indefinitely. After enough of that, people inevitably reach the rather less polite conclusion that those in charge couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.

The footbridge is only one small example of a much wider problem: promises are made, projects are announced, and when delivery fails to follow, responsibility becomes remarkably easy to pass around. Section 106, infrastructure, affordable housing — the explanations may differ, but the public experience is much the same: the promise was clear; the outcome isn’t.

And the timing could hardly be worse. Over the next couple of years, local government itself is being turned upside down. Boroughs and counties will disappear, responsibilities will move and decision-making will become more remote. Just when residents most need to know who can actually make something happen, the machinery of government is about to become more complicated.

People don’t expect perfection. They do expect somebody to make the decision, own it and deliver it. Otherwise frustration becomes cynicism, cynicism becomes disengagement, and disengagement creates fertile ground for those willing to exploit public anger.

“A plague on all your houses” may begin as a weary joke. When enough reasonable people reach that conclusion, it stops being funny.